my kitchen has grease all over the walls. need to repaint it.
oh, are you saying that the stuff around the bathtub isn’t grout, but is silicone? yeah, that’s the part that’s the worst.
The “green sauce” that I bought for my tent is also working well in the bathroom for bits of mildew in the caulk. But if I were to sell the place I’d probably just recaulk.
CLR for the soap scum.
If the door is simply off the track you might be able to fix that yourself, although it’s easier with two people.
Try a couple of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser sponges on the dirty kitchen walls. Might save you from needing to paint. Just rinse them often, and it might take more than one. If there’s dings in the wall you might need to repaint, but if it’s just dirty then Mr Clean is your friend.
I might just get the handyman to do all this work instead. he wants to charge me $2200. that was with installing a vanity that i no longer am gonna do because i’m too indecisive on something for a bathroom for an apartment that i might want to sell anyway. gonna see if he will charge me less.
Yeah. Grout=sand-like stuff in between the tiles. i’d spend a lot of time cleaning that before I resorted to the unholy task of taking it out and replacing it.
Silicone=flexible white bead around the tub/shower doors. that stuff just gets old, yellow/mildewy over time, so not really cleanable. the fix is, scrape it all out and replace it with new stuff. It’s a simple job, but takes some expertise. So even though it doesn’t look like much, I’d bring in the handyman to replace that.
i tried using tilex mold and meldew and only some of it came out.
Yeah, it won’t be easy, will take time, elbow grease and chemicals. But I’d take a ‘half-assed decent cleaning job’ over a full regrout any day, particularly if you’re selling it.
Not that I’d ever regrout. If we needed to regrout, my spouse would have me pull the whole wall down and do new tile entirely.
well i’m hiring the handyman to do all this regardless, not doing it myself. yeah, he said “regrout”, but it’s the silicone that is the main disaster here, not the grout. i didn’t know there was a difference.
Well the silicone is a crankier job than it looks. Putting new stuff in=easy. Like 5 minutes. Pulling the old stuff out, that can turn into an exercise where it’s easier to just burn the bathroom down rather than getting it all out. Seems like it should just scrape and pull out. Except it’s like it’s been designed by NASA to be impossible to remove properly. So don’t be surprised if there’s a bit of a bill for what seems like a small job.
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maybe when he said “regrout” he meant replace the silicone and clean the rest. the rest looks like it just needs to be cleaned.
Redoing the silicone (which had been grout until I scraped it out) around my tub is one of the few home repairs I’ve done on my own. I don’t actually remember for sure whether the old stuff was grout or silicone. Maybe it was silicone. I know I used a knife and razor blade for that job, and “cutting out old silicone” would be a reason to need those.
That sounds correct.
Or as I say, do your best, dap the rest!
Except dont let them use dap. Use silicone lol.
Two related annoyed thoughts:
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I usually try to not put on the heat in the house before November. I have never made it that far. Best I’ve done, I think, was October 28, probably 15-20 years ago. lately, we’ve been making it two or three weeks into the month before he have to use the heat. But this weekend, it got chilly. And has been damp, wet and windy. So on Sunday (it’s Tuesday now) we had to use the heat for the first time this season.
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If I put the heat on 67 or 68, it gets hot quickly. But if I put i down to 66 I’m cold. I have a sweatshirt and pants and socks on, but my fingertips get cold and it’s annoying. So, I’m either running the heat (and spending money and being hot) or I’m cold and annoyed…)
Or search out others who may charge less.
I never turn off my heat. It’s on a thermostat. It just doesn’t come on when the house is warm enough.
Set it to 66.5? If you have a digital thermostat you can maybe do this by changing the temp offset.
Bob Villa has some suggestions…
I do turn off the AC, because just the residual heat of the system that cycles on and off is enough that it attracts chipmunks to nest in the condenser. And when they do that, they chew stuff up and I need to get expensive service.
But the furnace feels room temp all summer, I don’t think it’s doing anything.
My heat and AC are one unit. Three settings: Cool, Off, and Heat.
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Mine is one unit but my thermostat doesn’t make me tell it to heat or cool. I tell it I want the house between 67 and 75 or whatever, and the thermostat figures it out.
Our heat settings are basically ‘not allowed to touch it’. Im cold pretty much year round including in the summer.
Strong minded spouse plus menopause. Dammit.
Actually, it’s two units. A furnace and a cooling unit that was added. One thermostat controls them both.
We have two zones, so four pieces of equipment.